


Spotlight/Stoplight

by integrase



Category: The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals - Team StarKid
Genre: Canon Setting, Gen, Headcanons galore!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-27
Updated: 2019-02-27
Packaged: 2019-11-06 09:53:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17937563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/integrase/pseuds/integrase
Summary: What causes a man to shift from trying to save the world from an enemy he predicted thirty years in the past, to sacrificing himself and his allies to said enemy- all in under twenty-four hours? Is Professor Hidgens a double agent? Is he delusional? Is he simply giving up?Or is it something much more painfully human?





	Spotlight/Stoplight

**Author's Note:**

> I had this bizarre chaotic neutral of a man stuck in my head today and had to let it out. This headcanon flopped when I posted it on Tumblr in December but I still think it's neat so you get to read it in a fully-fleshed story form. Also, I'm sorry in advance. Enjoy!
> 
> TW: A motor vehicle accident.

Rain. Of course it’s rainy. Nothing like a drizzle to hide your misdeeds, to slick down the your hair and make the last remaining strands of black melt into the greys, to make your aging bones ache with the wet and cold.

Professor Henry Hidgens curses the night in which he chose to carry out his mission.

He sniffs his runny nose a few times before relenting to his need for a handkerchief; he pulls the off-white rag from his jeans and wipes the rain from his face before using it to clear his nostrils. The cold autumn air chills his fingers in the few seconds they leave his jacket pockets to do this task. All in the meanwhile he is rushing through the back alley, and he nearly trips on a discarded tire on the gravel. Were he to have fallen, he would have thrown his toolbox and scattered his tools everywhere. The dark and the rain would have made it impossible to retrieve all of them- his mission would fail, for now.

It’s the last task required to complete the construction of his doomsday fortress. The sooner it is done, the better.

His home-slash-bunker sits at the end of a long road, at the top of a hill, a good distance away from those who would be considered his “next-door” neighbours. The high vantage point and isolation are two of the primary reasons he chose to purchase the house and the land; but tonight, it makes it more difficult to get to where he needs to go. He must go quickly, quietly, and ignore his old knee injury from his days in musical theatre as he half-jogs in the dark.

Finally. The sizeable metal box, painted an olive green, comes into view as he exits the alleyway and turns the corner. The rain dripping down its sides catches a few glitters from the far-off streetlights, but otherwise, the area is comfortably dark. Henry feels the weight of the flashlight in his pocket and the weight of what feels like rocks in his stomach. But he must do this. He skitters down the sidewalk and reaches the controller box for the neighbourhood’s power grid.

Henry takes a moment to assess his surroundings. The world is quiet here. To the south, the street becomes a bay, with residential driveways expanding from it like the spokes of a wheel. The east and west give the lanes of a back alley by which he travelled here. And to the north, the street curves slightly west, until being interrupted by a four-way intersection complete with stoplights. The green light from one of these stoplights glares at him, and Henry takes this as a sign to _go_ , to _begin_.

His toolbox now open on the concrete base of the structure, metallic gizmos and gadgets highlighted by the shine of his flashlight, Henry gets to work. The lock on the gridbox takes considerable effort to break, but he opens it just in time to hide in the back alley from a passing car. He counts to sixty before emerging from the darkness of the alleyway, wipes the rain from his face- or is that perspiration?- and returns to his worksite. The door of the gridbox, hinges caked with rust, creaks open. The switches and wires on the interior are not as contemporary as he was expecting and he takes a deep breath. Henry knows he can still do this. He’s always been good at improv.

This wire leads here. This one here. This one- ah, this switch. This switch is labelled like that, and that one like that. All Henry wants to do is reroute some power from the diner on the corner- _shut down for the night, not like they need the power right now!_ to his house on the hill. With just fifteen minutes of extra power, he can run a drill in his basement to crack through the unexpected layer of rock beneath. Then, he will run back to the gridbox and return the grid to normal. Once that’s done, he will spend the night installing a gamma ray radiation-resistant mini bunker in the freshly-made hole in his basement floor. He’s not sure how he will get enough lead to line the mini-bunker, but if there’s a will (and the internet), there’s a way.

A pick-up truck turns the corner at the intersection to the north and Henry feels his heart jump. With no time to run to the alley, he slams the door of the gridbox and leaps behind the hulking thing. He counts to one hundred fifty this time before he leaves this spot, and no truck driver comes to interrogate him, so he returns to his mission. His heart beats in his ears. The rain beats on the top of the box. Music beats out an open window, somewhere in the bay to the south.

After several awkward minutes hunched over, Henry feels about seventy-five percent sure he has figured out the necessary changes he will need to make to complete his mission. A few switches flipped, and a few wires rerouted, by his account. He wishes he could be more sure- he has a newfound respect for electricians and engineers. But he’s come this far already. He pulls on the rubber, insulating mittens from his toolbox over his cold hands, and leans into the gridbox to flip the first switch.

_Clunk_.

Henry does not expect anything to happen, and from what Henry can tell, nothing has happened. Flipping this switch, he believes, should have turned off the power to the diner, making it safe for him to rewire and reroute their power. He begins to busy himself with moving wires, a slow and awkward task in the huge gloves he wears, but he doesn’t want to be shocked and killed.

But-

Then Henry is shocked-

By a horrendous screech- a sickening bang- a crunching of metal-

Someone is killed.

Henry doesn’t know this. He can only hear a roaring in his ears and feel the adrenaline running though his veins. In his surprise, he knocked over his toolbox, dropped his flashlight. He turns his head to the north, from where he heard the commotion.

Two vehicles lay mangled in the intersection. It is difficult to see in the rainy night- there is no strong source of light nearby. That is, the streetlights and stoplights to the north _have no power_. Henry feels cold sweat running down his back. He can’t breathe. He blindly smacks that first switch, that one that’s supposed to turn off power at the diner.

To the north, streetlights regain their shine. They reveal a red minivan, the driver’s side crushed inwards to a grotesque degree, and a black sports car, the front crunched in like an accordion. A car horn plays from the scene, going on for far, far too long. Henry as he feels his dinner try to launch back out of his body, but he is already sprinting towards the back alley to home, having abandoned his tools. He looks back to the wreckage one more time and sees a red light where he had once seen an encouraging green.

_Stop._

But Henry Hidgens just runs.

 

***

 

“Remarkable! Simply remarkable!” says Henry in glee, gazing into a blue liquid sloshing about in a beaker. He moves the xenobiotic fluid down to the eye level of his shorter companion, a former student of his: Emma Perkins. The liquid nearly splashes out of the glass container due to Henry’s jerky movements and Emma flinches backwards.

The two (plus Ted, off in a quiet corner somewhere, drinking) have been in Henry’s dark and depressing bunker for an indeterminate amount of time now, waiting for Paul and Bill’s safe return with Alice. Henry can feel Emma’s patience, already minimal, being replaced by irritation and anxiety. It’s hard for Henry to focus on her feelings, though, when his mind races a mile a minute pondering the mystery of the aliens and their invasion of Hatchetfield. His voice rises and falls like the waves in the blue liquid as he chatters, “Tell me, Emma! How do you explain an entire race of beings spontaneously bursting into song and dance?”

Emma, with purply-black bags underneath her eyes, rubs her forehead and does not respond, so Henry continues, “How do they all know the lyrics? The choreography?” He stutters on this last sentence with realization. _Even their muscle movements- contractions and relaxations controlled by the nervous system- are coordinated. Remarkable!_

“I don’t know,” mutters Emma behind the tall man. She sounds exhausted. “They’re all getting orders from the mothership?”

The woman says this with bite, as if to mock Henry, but he barrels past this eagerly. He places a hand on Emma’s shoulder and leans in conspiratorially. There is whiskey on his breath- he had taken a few shots after overhearing a solemn conversation between Paul and Emma earlier. “You’re not far off. What we’re dealing with here is a collective consciousness!”

The tall man scurries away to set down the beaker, so he can gesture with his hands as he launches into a further explanation. One of his hands lands on Emma’s back as he explains, “On one level, they are individuals... but on another, they are all appendages of a much larger organism- all connected by a central brain.” In his head, he imagines a behemoth of an octopus, each tentacle joined to another, smaller cephalopod, joined to others... All of them are staring at him- judging him.

Emma seems to tune in. “And the brain came down in the meteor?”

“Or!” cries Henry, jerked out of his imagination. He places a tentacle- no, no, a finger- to Emma’s nose. “It _is_ the meteor.”

“Okay,” drawls Emma. It takes a moment for Henry to realize she is uncomfortable with his touch, and she only begins to speak again as he moves away. “And so it wants to kill us all so it can resurrect us as part of its shitty musical?”

Her body language and tone of voice express disbelief, but Henry can see in her eyes- eyes he can never get out of his head- that Emma is fearful of the implications of this hypothesis. He himself chokes on that idea. “That’s one way of putting it-”

Something inside of himself soars as his hectic brain reframes the idea: “- you could also say it’s uniting us in one common purpose. Think!” Henry grabs the barista again, revelling in how she is, for once, fully engrossed in their conversation. “Emma, if this entity were to spread to the entire planet... it could achieve what over fifty thousand years of human civilization never could.”

_There would be no war, no strife, no pain from the injustices done by others... We would think the same thoughts and move in synchronicity; we would sing and dance to the same tune. No more greed, no more envy, none of the seven deadly sins. This would fix_ everything _wrong with us. With- me._

All that comes out of Henry’s mouth, though, as realizations thunder upon his mind like stallions racing across a prairie landscape, is a faint mumble. “World peace.”

It is jarring for him to hear Emma ask, “Okay, but how do we stop it?”

A beat of sweat drips down into his left eyebrow. He takes a beat too long to reply to her with, “Yes. Of course. ‘Stop it.’”

His heart pounds. Henry speeds to his lab bench as Emma begins to pace and think aloud. He grabs a sterile syringe from a paper packet and fills it with a medicinal cocktail he was saving for a bad day- one designed to rapidly induce sleep. He can hear Emma as she narrates, “All right, all right. So, this all started with the meteor- it is the brain. So if we take it out, will all of these things just die?”

“That’s a sound theory, Emma,” agrees Henry. He sneaks in behind her, and flicks the syringe once, twice, to ensure there are no solids within the medicine. “Which is why it must never leave this room.”

“What? No!” blurts Emma, yet Henry is already upon her. She protests, twisting herself vigorously. The needle of the syringe is deep within her neck by now and Henry whispers, “Don’t fight it.”

Emma goes limp before the last _no_ can cross her lips. Henry grasps her tightly, thankful her body did not slip to the floor as the sleep took hold. He pockets the syringe before scooping the woman up into his arms, bridal-style. Old and achey, with a knee injury screaming at him to quit, Henry begins a slow walk through the fortress of his making. His subconscious guides him to a room he rarely visits nowadays.

He sets Emma’s limp form onto a chair, and retrieves some rope from a nearby closet that he uses to tie her to the seat. She is soundly knocked out, a little dribble of saliva coming down the corner of her mouth. Henry tries to grab his handkerchief from his pocket, but it is not there, so he uses his thumb to wipe the drool instead. _Out of all of the people I could be stuck with at the end of the world, it had to be her, hm?_ She looks so peaceful and he can’t hold it together any longer. 

“Jane Perkins,” he whispers. “Age 34. Killed in a car crash. Left behind a husband and children. Left behind- a sister. A younger sister named Emma.”

He fights back tears, kneeling on one knee in front of the woman. “I thought I saw a ghost when you walked into my classroom. I have Jane’s obituary on my fridge, you see, with that photo of her beside it. You have the same cheekbones, the same jawline, the same mess of hair. And the same eyes,” chokes out Henry. “The same eyes. They watch me every day. I didn’t mean to kill her. I didn’t mean... to hurt anyone. It was a mistake. I hit the wrong switch. It was a mistake.”

Shakily, he stands. He loses the small battle against his eyes and hot tears thus flow down his cheeks. “This is how I can fix it. This is how I can fix my mistake- how I can atone for causing your sister’s accident. I will set humanity on a better path and let the collective consciousness of the entity take over. It will save us _from ourselves_ , Emma. Then no one can make a mistake like I did. We’ll all have the same goals. The same rhythm...”

He catches himself rambling and takes a deep breath. “So I can’t let you leave and make a mess of things. But it’s for the best, Emma. I’m sorry about your sister. I’m so sorry.”

The apology, falling on Emma’s unhearing ears, hangs in the air. Henry resolves to let this be the last time he speaks of Jane while he is still human. When he and Emma join the collective consciousness, all of their secrets will be revealed to one another, anyway- and being a part of him, and him of her, Emma will understand and forgive. This is what he hopes.

When Henry’s tears finally dry up, he prepares for the end game. He exits his music studio and returns to his lab, where he fills a new syringe with the medicinal cocktail- this one will be Ted’s. If the man had continued his drinking at the rate Henry last witnessed, he will be glued to the couch in the rec room and easy to capture. Henry plans to tie Ted up to a chair next to Emma, then finish off whatever bottle Ted had been nursing. And then, Henry will have Alexa remove the security measures around the house.

And then?

Henry pauses on this thought both mentally and physically on his way to the rec room. He detours to his bedroom, and drops to his hands and knees next to the bed. From under here, he pulls out a dusty briefcase; his greatest work is contained within, locked away like the treasure it is. He enters the combination and pulls out a thick folder full of papers. Today is its day. Today is her day. Henry grabs a pencil from the pages of a crossword puzzle book on his bedside table, and scribbles onto the front page of the script within, _To Jane_.

And then, to fix it all.

Professor Henry Hidgens will give Emma and Ted what is wonderfully and truly,

A Showstoppin’ Number.


End file.
